Is Lazarus a good alternative for learning Delphi?

Question

I'm a teen who has been programming since 8 years old, so I know what I do. I want to take a look at Delphi Windows development.

The problem with this, is that Embarcadero's Delphi is really expensive, and I can't afford it.

I wanted to know if Lazarus is a good alternative, now for learning and hobby, but in a few years for working.

If I learn Lazarus now, would I know Delphi also ? Do I need to learn Pascal first ? Any good Lazarus books ? If I learn Lazarus from a Delphi book it's ok ?.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Some things to be aware of:

1. The component library for lazarus, the LCL is similar in many ways, to the VCL library for Delphi, but there are differences, the biggest being the many components in the VCL that are not in lazarus. As a means of learning Delphi programming, this seems to me to be the biggest shortcoming.

2. The IDE for Lazarus is similar in many ways to the Delphi 7 IDE (and older versions) and looks nothing at all, and works nothing at all, like modern Delphi IDE versions. So your learning of Lazarus would be somewhat transferable to the now-ancient version Delphi 7, but wouldn't be of much use in knowing your way around the delphi IDE. Installation of packages works completely differently too. Delphi has true support for packages, whereas lazarus rebuilds and relinks itself in order to add more "designtime components" to itself.

3. The base languages are also almost identical, but I would expect to find some strange differences. There is some brief description of the differences on Wikipedia.

I agree with Kico; The delphi starter edition is not expensive.